Shelby County Speedway
Pierce finds relief at SDN amid father's recovery
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Bobby Pierce streaks to heat race victory. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
HARLAN, Iowa (July 17) — Bobby Pierce was back in his office — his race car seat — Friday at Shelby County Speedway. It wasn’t just like old times, though, because his father Bob wasn’t there by his side. | RaceWire
As the 29-year-old superstar from Oakwood, Ill., readied for the dual-heat qualifying program for the Al Belt Custom Homes Silver Dollar Nationals, his father was over an hour away resting in a bed at Omaha’s University of Nebraska Medical Center. The elder Pierce, 74, was recovering from emergency surgery after a Wednesday medical episode doctors termed a “borderline major stroke.”
This was a rare situation for Bobby, who has gone racing without his father in the pits just a handful of times since starting his racing career some two decades ago. But after a whirlwind 48 hours of unease surrounding his father’s health, he felt a sense of relief to be back at the track with the knowledge that his biggest fan and supporter was seemingly going to be OK.
“It was scary,” Pierce said while standing in the air-conditioned comfort of his team’s trailer before the start of Friday’s program. “It was pretty bad. He got pretty lucky. I’m just very grateful that, like, he’s acting normal right now and everything should be good. I actually just got off the phone with him now.”
After skipping Thursday’s Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned Malvern Bank Go 50 at Shelby County to spend time with his father, Pierce returned to some normalcy on Friday. He needed it after the anxiety surrounding his father’s medical emergency.
The morning after Pierce scored a $15,000 Lucas Oil Series victory on Tuesday night at Adams County Speedway in Corning, Iowa, he was sleeping in his hauler parked at the shop of his friend Mike Albertson, a stock car racer who lives about an hour-and-a-half north of the track. He drove there after the race with plans to spend Wednesday working on his equipment in preparation for Shelby County’s weekend.
Bob had stayed at Adams County with his wife, Angie, in their camper that pulls Bobby’s T-shirt trailer. In the morning he suffered a stroke while in the bed of his motorhome, leading Angie to frantically call for help as Bob lost feeling in his left side and had difficulty speaking.
Lucas Oil Series regular Carson Ferguson, who was parked alongside the Pierces, came to Angie’s aid, comforting and talking with Bob in the motorhome while Angie awaited the arriving ambulance crew. Ferguson helped the paramedics get Bob to the stretcher for transport to the nearby Corning airport so he could be airlifted to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha for immediate specialized care.
Bobby was soon awakened in his rig by his crew member Justin Stehl, who had answered a phone call from Bobby’s wife Abby. Bobby’s mother had dialed up Abby, who was at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, working sprint car races as a Ms. Eldora, so Abby could relay the news to Bobby.
“She was on Justin's phone, so Justin handed me the phone,” Bobby said of his wife. “She told me and it was a lot to take in. Like, I’m trying to wake up … I really didn’t get much sleep because I was kind of up late, you know, from the adrenaline of winning the race and driving to Mike’s shop.
“We were immediately like, ‘OK, where do we got to go?’ ”
Bobby and his crew borrowed a truck and quickly headed toward Omaha. They made it in time for Bobby to speak with his father before he was taken in for an emergency procedure in which surgeons ran a catheter through his groin up to his carotid artery to remove a blockage.
“When we were waiting in the waiting room for his surgery, I feel like all the nurses and doctors made it seem like, ‘Oh, it's just another day in the office,’ at least for them,” Pierce said. “So it like made us feel better, because, man, really knowing how bad it could have been and stuff like that, I would have been more nervous.”
Nevertheless, Bob’s time in the operating room had Bobby and his mother anxiously awaiting a report from the doctors.
“Before he went into surgery, of course my mom was saying like, you know, how bad it kind of was,” Pierce said. “And then when I saw him before surgery and he was talking and kind of even had a sense of humor … like, you know, when they were like saying they’re going to scan his brain, he’s like, ‘Ah, you won’t find nothing in there.’ So that kind of gave me hope that he’d be fine.
“And then after surgery, I went over there to the room he was going to be in because I kind of kept like waiting for them to tell us when he would be out. Then I saw him in there and I peeked around the nurses and I saw him, like, moving his left hand and everything by himself, so I was like, ‘OK, that's great.’”
Pierce called his father’s condition “a night and day difference from when he went into surgery until he came out,” which spoke to the success of the procedure. Bob regained feeling, movement and his normal speech afterward, making Pierce thankful that the Adams County police, paramedics and LifeNet/Life Flight crew were able to respond to Bob’s emergency so efficiently and get him to a world-class facility for the quick treatment necessary for a stroke victim.
Although Bob’s prognosis ended up being positive, the long, uncertain Wednesday prompted Bobby to bag his plans to run Shelby County’s weekend opener. He instead spent Thursday retrieving his parents’ motorhome from Adams County and parking it in Omaha near the hospital, tending to his race cars and visiting with his father.
“Yesterday I planned to go see him in the morning,” Pierce said. “And I was like, ‘Man, if I’m gonna race (Friday), it would give me peace of mind to get all my ducks in a row.’ You know, he was doing fine, so then I went to the shop to work on the car and was late by the time we loaded up and left.
“Then I took the truck to the hospital and I hung out with Bob from like 12:30 (a.m.) till I left (to return to Shelby County) at like 3 a.m. when (doctors) came in to check on him.”
Pierce, who wrote and posted a detailed update about his father on Facebook late Friday morning, said Bob is scheduled to undergo a second procedure on Monday to have a stent placed in his carotid artery to open up blood flow to his brain and prevent future episodes. If all goes well, he could be released as soon as Tuesday.
Of course, once Bob checks out of the hospital, then Bobby, his mother and his crew will face the tall order of making sure Bob doesn’t push himself too hard. Bob is a force of nature who never seems to slow down — he’s still full-bore traveling the circuit with Bobby even after a bout with bladder cancer seven years ago — but after this scare Bobby wants him to back off his furious pace.
“He’s an animal for sure,” Pierce said. “He’s super tough, and definitely the toughest guy I know. I’m very proud of him. I know my dad, he’s not some young spry chicken, but he definitely gets around like a young guy a lot of times.
“We’re gonna have to definitely stay on him. He knows we’ll definitely have lots of things for him to still do, but do it at a slow pace. I’m like, ‘Listen, like, no, you’re not pulling an engine out of the car. Really, just take it easy.
“Of course, you have to manage his stress, but how do you do that when we’re racing? Our whole life is stress,” he continued. “But we’re gonna do our best with him.”
Pierce said when his “helmet goes on the world shuts off a little bit,” so it felt liberating to return to the track knowing his father was on the road to recovery. He picked up right where he left off on Tuesday, too, winning his first round heat and finishing second in Round 2 to earn enough passing points for the outside pole position in Saturday’s 80-lap, $52,000-to-win Silver Dollar Nationals finale, a race he won in 2019 at I-80 Speedway in Greenwood, Neb.
“I was definitely thinking of my dad all night and I was able to call him and talk to him about different things,” Pierce said. “Kind of just went off the (prior) notes and made some tweaks … it was very good to, you know, have a successful night for Bob and Angie watching back at the hospital. I was gonna go see him tonight, but he said he's tired and wants to go to sleep.”
There was one anxious moment shortly before his second-round heat when a spark plug broke off as Stehl was putting in a new set. Pierce momentarily thought he might have to hastily unload his backup car because he couldn’t risk running the engine with a piece of the spark plug still inside it, but veteran modified racer Jeff Leka, a longtime family friend who often provides Pierce extra crew help and changed his weekend plans to join Pierce at Shelby County with Bob hospitalized, was able to clear out the flotsam in time for Pierce to make his prelim and run the distance without incident.
“We didn’t tell Bob and Angie about the spark plug thing,” Pierce smiled, noting he didn’t want to alarm his father of a problem.
Leka also served as Pierce’s signaler, filling the role that Bob has for the entirety of his son’s career. Pierce said Leka was “a little nervous” to don Bob’s familiar pink signaling vest and use Bob’s signal sticks — Bob and Bobby, after all, virtually have their own signaling language because they’ve done it so long — but he praised him for doing a “great job” in Bob’s place.
Pierce is hopeful that he’ll have his father back assisting him at the track in the near future, but Bob’s absence Friday did give Bobby a look at life without his dad in the pits. He’s had the thought in the back of his mind because Bob has mentioned that he’s not going to be Bobby’s crew chief forever, but he hopes he still has plenty of time left with Bob as his right-hand man.
“I can do a lot of the things he does and I’m right there with him all the time so I know what we do,” said Pierce, who gave special thanks to all the people who helped his family and messaged him about his father over the past couple days. “And my crew guys, we all kind of pitch in where we’re lacking. But when we gotta make a quick adjustment, Bob’s really good at doing that while we’re doing other stuff. So, of course, when we’re missing that part, that makes it hard if, say, we’re in a fire-drill rush. A lot of times we won’t have much time to get tires off and they’re already calling us back to the track or something, so yeah, we’re going to miss him there.
“And making even like a suggestion, he’s good at that when either one of us is like, ‘Should we do this or this?’ We definitely communicate well on what to do.
“But he’s a phone call away right now, so that’s really good,” he added. “And we’re gonna have him back with us soon, which is the best news."
